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Project 1: Introduction

Lesson 9 from: Compositing for Digital Scrapbookers

Tiffany Tillman-Emanuel

Project 1: Introduction

Lesson 9 from: Compositing for Digital Scrapbookers

Tiffany Tillman-Emanuel

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Lesson Info

9. Project 1: Introduction

Lesson Info

Project 1: Introduction

I wanna talk about this project a little bit before I get started with showing you all the layers and what we're gonna be creating. This project, like all of my projects, is really important to me because it's a page that doesn't seem like it has value, as I talked about before, but it does, it really does. So this page right here, which again, when I had it printed by the lovely persnickety people, I forgot to include my title so I've just had it printed again and they would be happy to do it. This page is called Cosmic Girl and the actual final has her silhouette in it that you can see with the text of an actual song title in there. And the song is by Jamiroquai and it's one of my favorite songs. The entire album is my favorite song but the name of the song is called Cosmic Girl which I think of my daughter as, as out of the world kinda chick. You know, you know fun stuff. But the song is really beautiful to me because the song came out I think in the 90s, like 96, 97 or something an...

d when my daughter was born in 2003, that was one of the albums I listened to so she got a lot of listening to this album and we would dance to this song all the time. And we are both horrible, horrible dancers, okay? Now, she had pass, she was like two. I didn't have a pass, I just can't dance very well. So but anyway, we had a lot of fun dancing together and not just this song but a lot of different songs on a day to day basis. The thing was, is I was a stay at home mom and she was home with me and we would dance to these songs together, there was no one to take photos of us dancing together but that doesn't mean that I still don't want to scrapbook and have this memory for the rest of my life, right? Or the rest of hers. I still want her to know, "Hey, we did this together." And we would, in our minds, imagine that we were on some funky space town on the moon dancing somewhere, Cosmic Girl, over in the universe in space. And so that was where the concept of the idea came to mind that said hey, I'm going to create this kind of space, funky looking layout that has her in a pose where she looks like she's kinda dancing because it will turn me back to that spot where I remember dancing with my two year old little daughter. Which I have no photos of so scrapbooking in this style can be really cool because it can help you create some type of scene that you might not have photos for, you might not have the words for it, but you can visually still tell the story using your images. And that's why this layout is important to me. Now, this particular layout, if we are going to jump into Photoshop, has quite a bit of layers and I wanted to kind of just introduce to you what we would be doing. I've got the flatten file open so you can see overall when you actually add the title which was not, again, on my printed piece, how it does look. We are gonna create that title today. But this is the silhouette that you can see and it has the song lyrics to the title, or not, the song lyrics and the title breaded into her silhouette. There's a lens flare to kind of give you some definition in the trees and there are trees back here and I took this photo near a mountain, well, a hill near our home. We don't have any mountains. And then there is this moon that is some way blended into the background and it also has exterior blending as well. So if you are following along and you have access to all of the great materials that come with this class, then you already have the working file and what I wanna do is just kind of introduce you guys to some of the layers that we're gonna be working with. It doesn't seem like a lot. There isn't the silhouette that's been added, you can add your own silhouette if you wanna add it to the piece. And of course we haven't added the title yet because the title is kind of burned into the silhouette. But starting from the bottom, we have a background layer, okay? This is just a paper layer that's been added to it. There's no blending that's going on. And I'm gonna walk through individually how all of these pieces came together but I did wanna deconstruct it for you guys. And then here's the forest and this is blended in and it's got a little layers mask on that and we've created a levels layer up there to give it a little bit more oomph. I'm just gonna call it oomph. Then I use some shape layers to add a little bit of visual flow. So I'm gonna talk about visual flow and how that's important especially in a conceptualized layout, a composited layout because if you don't have flow, then you don't know where to look. And when you take a photo, you think about where things are placed on your photo and how things move in the photograph. Well in your layouts you do that, we do that all the time when we're making traditional or paper-based kind of layouts. All of those graphic design rules do not go away just because we're making something that's more thematic or inspired by or out of this world, whatever you wanna call it, or more surreal or imaginative. We still use those graphic design principles so I'm gonna talk about those as we develop the layout. Next we have a lens flare and these are what I like to use as lighting effects to change the mood of the page. So you can see this particular lens flare, as I'm adding it, it does things to the page. And you can use lens flare like the one that you see actually right here but you can also do it to change the mood and add more drama. So we're gonna create some drama. And then of course there's the moon and there's a lot of little things going on to make the moon work.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Blending Practice Files
Cosmic Girl Working Files
Exclusive Bonus for Students
Outter Space Papers
Tiny Hero Working Files
Workbook

Ratings and Reviews

Phyllis
 

I was in Tiffany's Mixed Media class and was also lucky enough to be in this class. Tiffany is an AWESOME instructor and well organized. Her Mixed Media class was a great building block for this class. The class is well worth the money--well organized workbook and other great bonuses. If you want to take your scrapbooking to the next artistic level, I highly recommend Tiffany's two classes at CreativeLivel.

a Creativelive Student
 

Great course with easy to understand ways of blending more than one photo together for a great composite layout. Excellent materials and workbooks.. Thanks Tiffany for a wonderful class! - Christa (cfile)

E.L. Bl/Du
 

I think Tiffany is good at explaining it so those who arent pro photgraphers can start at the basics to learn photoshop. I really liked watching this even tho my vision is in another direction, I like how she explains how to get there in photoshop. She makes it not so scary to jump in. She is clever mom too, every parent wants their own kids to be a star and she surely did that. What a neat thing to "scrapbook" the photos. I liked learning adjustment layers, would like more in curves too. But great place to start out in ps. I recommend if your lost in PS.

Student Work

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